Letter: VA prognosis not all doom and gloom

Have Art DeJong, Norm Veldboom or Jack Wirtz ever been to a VA hospital or clinic? They seem to know everything about what's going on there. Or is it just what Fox News is reporting that day?

I have been going to the VA hospital since 1990. It was the way they describe in their letters. But that was 34 years ago. You waited for hours in a waiting room just to get an appointment back then. And then you waited for hours just to see the doctor you had an appointment with. Sometimes you waited four to five hours when you had your appointment at 2 p.m. and you finally got to see the doctor at 6:30 p.m.

If you left you started all over again. From 1990 until 2008 I was going though this every time I went to the VA in Milwaukee. In 2010 the VA started letting me see doctors here at the Sheboygan Clinic and they paid the bills. Yes private doctors where being paid by the government for treating a veteran.

This is nothing new; it has been going on for years. My last three visits to the VA in Milwaukee where drastically different than years before. I saw my doctor within minutes of my appointment, not hours like before. I was treated with respect and the doctors and nurses went out of their way to accommodate me and my wife. It was a complete turnaround from years past.

And now I have an appointment for the first time next month at the VA facility in Cleveland, after being on the waiting list since it opened years ago. Obama was not the president in the 1990s; and not until 2008 when things first started improving at the VA.

I speak from first-hand experience, not talking points from an anti-Obama channel.

Robert Ries

Sheboygan

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Letter: VA prognosis not all doom and gloom

Have Art DeJong, Norm Veldboom or Jack Wirtz ever been to a VA hospital or clinic? They seem to know everything about what's going on there. Or is it just what Fox News is reporting that day?

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